A year into the Great War, Lindsay's Art of the Moving Picture alluded to Wells's role in shaping how cinema came to image mass-modernity and its Utopian possibilities: ‘The World State is indeed far away. But as we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other's eyes, in pictures and in fact.’ However, WTSW (1899) shows how Wells first projected the implications of sound and image recording into a totally urbanised dystopian future where public and private space are saturated with advanced systems of marketing and control. Effectively, it gathers together diverse ‘optical speculations’ into an organised social system. Wells's insights into displaced subjectivity and wish-fulfilment in the consumer and into the construction of charismatic electronic presence by ‘hyperreal’ means are crucial aspects of this. Moreover, this chapter addresses the principal legacy of Wells's early critique in the self-reflexive ‘videology’ of the science fiction film genre (to use Stewart's term), from Fritz Lang's silent epic Metropolis (1926) onwards. Strangely, key transactions between WTSW and related texts and Lang's film have been unexplored until now.

WTSW is crucial to understanding Wells's method of ‘seeing the future’ and its speculations about how media technology would shape the way urbanised modernity might see. John Logie Baird referred to Wells as the ‘demi-god’ of his youth and was inspired by WTSW 's predictions of television and its effects on viewers in his own pioneering experiments. Philmus and Hughes point out that the lost revisions of TM seem to resemble the world of WTSW more than other versions of his first scientific romance. Indeed, Wells began WTSW early and was continuously drawn back to it, tinkering and raiding it for ideas to develop for the rest of his career. Nicolletta Vallorani argues that reworkable potential also makes it ‘the most popular of Wells's scientific romances in terms of cinematic exploitation’, even though there has never been a named adaptation as such.

Wells has undeservedly acquired a popular reputation for gung-ho technophilia and optimism about the inevitability of social and material progress through scientific change.